The course is based on materials I developed for a successful face-to-face course in the 1980s and 90s, which saw a number of students sell their novels. A lot has changed in the fiction business since then, but the storytelling basics remain the same.

So feel free to explore the course, download the PDFs, do the assignments (ungraded, for your eyes only!), and apply the ideas to your own work. I hope you find it helpful.

Ursula K. Le Guin has died at 88. For news that might have been expected, it still came as a shock, and one felt around the world. Her name instantly trended on Twitter, with posts in Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish.

It was a personal shock as well. I first heard of her 50 years ago, when I learned that her novel A Wizard of Earthsea and my children’s book Wonders, Inc., would both be on the fall 1968 list of Parnassus Press. A few years later I wrote her a fan letter about Wizard; she wrote back saying she’d been reading my book to her kids.

A Wizard of Earthsea shaped my own writing career. Her ocean world, studded with strange islands, inspired the Gulf of Islands — the Salish Sea, 10 million years from now — in my novel Eyas. And my hero’s journey into Hell was a homage to Le Guin’s Ged and his journey through the land of the dead.

More importantly, Le Guin almost instantly established herself as the only grownup in the field. Science fiction and fantasy were genres derived straight from teenage boys’ dreams of teenage-boy glory, with hot weapons, cool spaceships, and a princess as the prize.

Le Guin cooled our jets in 1969 with The Left Hand of Darkness, about a world locked in ice and populated by humans who become male or female for about five days a month; one can be both a father and a mother. The ambassador from Earth is called “the pervert” because he never quits being male. Half a century later we are still trying to come to terms with what she understood then.

Other books challenged other complacencies. The Dispossessed describes twin worlds, Urras and its moon Anarres — the first a capitalist, class-ridden culture and the second a colony of collectivist anarchist refugees who are taught as children not to “egoize.” Canadian man of letters George Woodcock, himself a philosophical anarchist, thought it was the greatest book on anarchy ever written — and it describes anarchy in decay.

It might feature such thought-stretching concepts as time travel and warp drives, but reading science fiction actually makes you read more “stupidly”, according to new research.

In a paper published in the journal Scientific Study of Literature, Washington and Lee University professors Chris Gavaler and Dan Johnson set out to measure how identifying a text as science fiction makes readers automatically assume it is less worthwhile, in a literary sense, and thus devote less effort to reading it. They were prompted to do their experiment by a 2013 study which found that literary fiction made readers more empathetic than genre fiction.

Their study, detailed in the paper The Genre Effect, saw the academics work with around 150 participants who were given a text of 1,000 words to read. In each version of the text, a character enters a public eating area and interacts with the people there, after his negative opinion of the community has been made public. In the “literary” version of the text, the character enters a diner after his letter to the editor has been published in the town newspaper. In the science fiction version, he enters a galley in a space station inhabited by aliens and androids as well as humans.

After they read the text, participants were asked how much they agreed with statements such as “I felt like I could put myself in the shoes of the character in the story”, and how much effort they spent trying to work out what characters were feeling.

Gavaler and Johnson write that the texts are identical apart from “setting-creating” words such as “door” and “airlock”: they say this should have meant that readers were equally good at inferring the feelings of characters, an ability known as theory of mind.

This was not the case. “Converting the text’s world to science fiction dramatically reduced perceptions of literary quality, despite the fact participants were reading the same story in terms of plot and character relationships,” they write. “In comparison to narrative realism readers, science fiction readers reported lower transportation, experience taking, and empathy. Science fiction readers also reported exerting greater effort to understand the world of the story, but less effort to understand the minds of the characters. Science fiction readers scored lower in comprehension, generally, and in the subcategories of theory of mind, world, and plot.”

Readers of the science fiction story “appear to have expected an overall simpler story to comprehend, an expectation that overrode the actual qualities of the story itself”, so “the science fiction setting triggered poorer overall reading”.

The science fiction setting “appears to predispose readers to a less effortful and comprehending mode of reading – or what we might term non-literary reading – regardless of the actual intrinsic difficulty of the text”, they write.

As the article notes later on, this reaction has more to do with the reader's literary tastes than with any intrinsic stupidity in a story about airlocks and androids. It's a bit like thinking leopards are less serious than zebras because you're a vegetarian who likes to wear stripes.

Case in point: I'm not an eager reader of romance novels for women. But when I taught a course in writing commercial fiction, some of my students were eager to succeed in that genre, so I read their work. My goodness! It was pretty steamy stuff, but utterly unlike sexual tensions in male-centred fiction. And one of my students, at least, went on to a successful career publishing such romances.

Literary genres, like leopards and zebras, coexist in a literary ecosystem. Last century's downmarket pulp dystopia is this century's prophetic vision. And last century's monumental literary triumph is now remembered, if at all, only by Ph.D. candidates desperate for a dissertation subject.

Aspiring writers in any genre need to ask themselves why that genre interests them: what is it about its conventions, settings, and themes. Otherwise they're imitating far more than inventing. When they do understand their genre—SF, fantasy, romance, whatever—they can explore it more fully, and perhaps find something it can do, find a variation on its themes, that no one has found before.

They might even break through the walls of that genre, and build a new one...neither better nor worse than any other, but creating the taste for a new way to portray a brave new world, and all the people in it.

I’m happy to report that Endeavour Press in the UK has published my novel The Empire of Time as an e-book in its Venture Press SF titles. (If you’re not in the US, your local Amazon site should have it.)

The Empire of Time was my first published novel, brought out by Del Rey Books in 1978. It had had a long gestation: I began to think it out in the 1960s, and kept adding ideas as I ran across them or they occurred to me. In the late 1960s I actually started writing, and produced (on a genuine typewriter) about 100 pages of text.

In hindsight, I can see it was a farrago of what I liked to read in those days: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ian Fleming, as well as countless SF stories time-traveling or interstellar secret agents.

Then I paused, without a clue where to go next. I had no one to blame but myself. My father and stepmother were professional TV writers who outlined their scripts before writing them; I’d just started typing while hoping for the best. So the manuscript sat there for several years, while I also learned the craft of teaching and earned a master’s degree.

In the process I learned a lot more about the structure of fiction, and when I returned to the manuscript I understood it better than I had. Then I read a news story about the possibility that the Antarctic ice sheet might collapse—which led to another novel, Icequake, which Endeavour will soon make available again.

While Icequake bounced back from various publishers, I took some lessons from it, returned to The Empire of Time, and finished it. It was still too hard-boiled, but I’d also read early John Le Carré: my secret agent Gerry Pierce was no James Bond. He was a guy with problems and talents who’d been studiously manipulated into becoming a killer.

Gerry’s life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries seemed pretty remote in the 1970s; since then, I’ve thought of him as living in another chronoplane from ours. We failed to discover his timeline’s chronoplanes and mind-control technology; his timeline messed up on computers and settled for microfiches, flickreaders instead of smartphones, and a primitive internet that Gerry Pierce could hack when he needed to.

In the late 1970s everything came together, and The Empire of Time was published not long before Icequake. My timing was lucky—publishers were still grubstaking outliers like me in hopes they might be the next Stephen King or Frank Herbert. They were still willing to bet on a writer whose third or fourth book might gain a big audience eager to read the writer’s backlist.

Writers could also treat each novel as training for the next one: We’d learn from our mistakes, build on our successes, and tackle more ambitious projects with some confidence. And since the market was changing rapidly, we had an incentive to change as well: I moved from time travel to far-future societies, nanotech to young adult tales, and then to fantasy. The Empire of Time, which I’d considered a one-off, turned into a trilogy (the rest will be available soon from Endeavour).

Revisiting The Empire of Time, of course I’m itching to clean up this sentence, improve that conversation, smooth out the clunky exposition. But after all these years it still seems to me to hang together as a story about believable people in a strange but believable world, and everyone in a hell of a believable jam.

Via The Guardian: Brian Aldiss obituary. It seems impossible that he's gone; he's been a presence in literature, especially SF, for 60 years. Excerpt:

Brian Aldiss, author of the classic Helliconia trilogy, and the story on which Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence was based, was one of Britain’s most accomplished and versatile writers of science fiction. In a lifelong and prolific career, Aldiss, who has died aged 92, produced more than 40 novels and almost as many short-story collections.

An ambitious and gifted writer, with a flowing and inventive literary style, he did not confine himself to science fiction. As well as his prodigious output of SF, he wrote several bestselling mainstream novels, poetry, drama, two autobiographies and several film scenarios. He also edited a huge number of anthologies and produced a body of criticism that was remarkable for its energy and clarity.

About five years ago, Ari Popper enrolled in a course on science-fiction writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, hoping to distract himself from the boredom of his day job as the president of a market-research company.

“It was, like, the best ten weeks of my life,” Popper told me recently. “But I knew I wasn’t going to pay the bills as a science-fiction writer.” Still, the course gave him an idea: since businesses often spend money trying to predict how the world will change, and since speculative fiction already traffics in such predictions, perhaps one could be put in service of the other—corporate consulting through sci-fi narratives.

Soon, Popper quit his job, sold his house, and launched his own firm, SciFutures. Today, his network of a hundred or so authors writes customized stories for the likes of Visa, Ford, Pepsi, Samsung, and nato. Popper calls their work “corporate visioning.” A company that monetizes literary imagination might itself seem like a dystopian scenario worthy of Philip K. Dick. “There can be a little tension,” Trina Phillips, a full-time writer and editor at SciFutures, acknowledged. The authors’ stories, she added, which range in length from a few hundred to several thousand words, are “not just marketing pieces, but sometimes we have to pull back or adjust to accommodate a brand.”

She and Popper have found that clients generally prefer happy endings, though unhappy ones are permissible if the author also proposes a clear business strategy for avoiding them. Rarely is there room for off-topic subplots or tangential characters. Phillips mentioned one story that initially featured a kangaroo running amok in a major North American city. The client, a carmaker, asked that the marsupial be removed.

One spectre that appears often in the stories is the “dematerialization” of shopping. “The prospect of removing all friction from shopping is very frightening for companies that rely on consumers coming into the store and being swayed by packaging and pricing,” Popper said.

He expects that, in the next decade, artificial-intelligence programs will do an increasing share of home shopping, often without any direct human supervision. They will keep track of inventories; negotiate prices for goods such as garbage bags, dog food, and groceries; and order new products on behalf of consumers. Companies that market directly to A.I. software, rather than to humans, might gain a competitive advantage.

Today I got a note from an aspiring author, worried about someone stealing a good story idea. I've heard the question many times, and here's what I generally answer:

Your stuff probably isn’t worth stealing.

Not that it’s a bad idea—but it’s an idea that’s probably been explored many times before. Even if you’ve got a good angle on it, how would anyone “steal” it? They’d have to find a known writer with a good sales track record, who would be willing to crank out a novel based on your idea, and then spend thousands to edit, print, distribute, and publicize it. Chances are that, like most novels, it would die within six weeks.

Note that I'm talking about novels. Stealing a good idea for a movie makes sense, because millions are involved, but novels are strictly small change. A good thief never steals anything small.

Publishing is all about making money, not throwing it away. A successful writer wouldn’t go along with the steal, partly out of sheer ego—“My own ideas are better than this one.” And the time it would take to write a rip-off novel would be time taken away from their own projects. On top of that, being exposed as a story thief would ruin the writer’s reputation, and the publisher’s. (Every contract has a clause about legal battles that might result from publication, and the author has to take responsibility with the publisher.)

So honesty is more or less forced on publishers. So send them your pitch, with a good sample of your novel in progress. And if they like the idea, and the writing is competent, and you can tell a good story, they will gamble with an unknown writer. Even if they lose, it's just small change. And if they win, they'll gladly publish every book you write, with lots of publicity.

There was Malaysian magic present the British Fantasy Awards yesterday (Sept 25). Selangor-born Zen Cho was voted Best Newcomer for her book, Sorcerer To The Crown, at the awards held at FantasyCon 2016 in Scarborough, England.

The book is set in Regency-era London and sees Zacharias Wythe, England’s first African Sorcerer Royal, attempting to discover why the country’s magical stocks are drying up. Published by Macmillan, it is the first story in Cho’s Sorcerer Royal historical fiction trilogy.

She beat The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, The Vagrant Peter Newman, The Heir To The North by Steven Poore, and When The Heavens Fall by Marc Turner. Sorcerer To The Crown was also nominated for Best Fantasy Novel, but that award went to Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.

Cho, 30, currently resides in London and was the first Malaysian to receive the William L Crawford Fantasy Award from the International Association For The Fantastic In The Arts, for her book Spirits Abroad, a collection of short stories within the speculative fiction genre. She was also the editor of Cyberpunk: Malaysia, a collection of science fiction stories published by Fixi Novo.

We are presently in a golden age of global SF and fantasy, and Zen Cho is a big reason for it. Authors from all over the world, many of them women, are incorporating new cultural concepts in genres that had been at risk of what might be called ossified Tolkienism. In both her novel and her stories, Cho is a fresh, distinct voice. I look forward to her next novels and short stories.

There is no such thing as a “typical” day, even when I’m busy on a book. Some days the words flow, others feel like wading through suet. The phone rings, the doorbell sounds, there’s shopping to be done or an urgent email demanding a reply. That’s why I try to get away.

I’ve got a house on the north-east coast of Scotland, three and a half hours by car from Edinburgh. Very limited mobile phone signal and no TV. There’s a landline but I haven’t given the number to my agent, publisher or any journalist. Perfect.

I’m in the middle of a new book right now. It’s going pretty well. The first draft took me 27 writing days. It’s rough – really just me checking the plot works. The second draft sees me polish the prose, fix faults in chronology and geography, and add meat to the bones of my characters.

So while my first drafts are usually done at a gallop – if I’m writing quickly, then the story will also have pace – I take things more slowly in the second and third drafts. The third draft is normally what my publisher and agent get to see.

His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman is heading a new charge from writers demanding to be rewarded fairly for their work, as the Society of Authors warns that unless “serious” changes are made by publishers, the professional author “will become an endangered species”.

In an open letter to Britain’s publishers, the Society of Authors points to a recent survey that found that the median income of a professional author is now just £11,000, with only 11.5% of UK writers making a living solely from writing.

Pointing out that “authors remain the only essential part of the creation of a book and it is in everyone’s interests to ensure they can make a living”, it tells publishers that “unfair contract terms, including reduced royalty rates, are a major part of the problem”.

Pullman, the current president of the society, said that the case for fair terms for writers was “overwhelming”.

“From our positions as individual creators, whether of fiction or non-fiction, we authors see a landscape occupied by several large interests, some of them gathering profits in the billions, some of them displaying a questionable attitude to paying tax, some of them colonising the internet with projects whose reach is limitless and whose attitude to creators’ rights is roughly that of the steamroller to the ant,” said Pullman.

“It’s a daunting landscape, far more savage and hostile to the author than any we’ve seen before. But one thing hasn’t changed, which is the ignored, unacknowledged, but complete dependence of those great interests on us and on our talents and on the work we do in the quiet of our solitude. They have enormous financial and political power, but no creative power whatsoever. Whether we’re poets, historians, writers of cookery books, novelists, travel writers, that comes from us alone. We originate the material they exploit.”

The society wants authors to receive at least 50% of ebook revenue, rather than 25%, and is also asking publishers not to discriminate against writers “who don’t have powerful agents”.

“Some publishers are excellent but we see many inequitable contracts. Without serious contract reform, the professional author will become an endangered species and publishers – as well as society at large – will be left with less and less quality content,” says the letter, sent by Society of Authors’ chief executive Nicola Solomon.

“Unless publishers treat their authors more equitably the decline in the number of full-time writers could have serious implications for the breadth and quality of content that drives the economic success and cultural reputation of our creative industries in the UK.”

All writers want, said Pullman, “is fairness”. “We don’t want these great powers to disappear altogether: the things they do are often things that need doing. Books are physical objects that need to be manufactured and transported and sold, or digital entities that need to be formatted and made available online. Sometimes there are things we wish they would do a little more of: editorial standards are not what they were. All those things are necessary and should be rewarded – but rewarded fairly. So is our work, and so should we,” said the novelist.

The Tyee has published my article A Better Force Awakens, in which I criticize Star Wars, Star Trek, and the general quality of industrial SF and fantasy over the last quarter-century or so. But all is not lost:

By the 1990s, I understood the new market far less than I'd understood the old one in the 1970s. And I pretty well packed it in after I'd spent four years writing a novel for an agent who returned it saying only, "No one here can think 'blockbuster' about it."

By then I could go into the science fiction and fantasy section of a bookstore, search the shelves for an hour, and leave empty-handed. The sharecroppers' Star Wars and Star Trek novels filled up too many of those shelves, and the rest were clogged with umpteen boring sequels to some groundbreaker like Frank Herbert's Dune or Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

I felt like some Amazonian forest dweller whose land has been cleared to graze cattle for the American hamburger market. A vast genre of popular literature had become mere franchises, like competing pizza chains.

In the process, the franchisers had taught a generation of readers and viewers -- and writers! -- to prefer predictable sameness, not surprising variety. If it appeared at all, variety was just ever-bigger special effects, rendered by ever-bigger computers.

If I have any consolation, it's that the artisans are beginning to flourish again in the shadow of the franchises. God knows how they're finding publishers, but some astonishing writers are springing up like weeds among the cowpies.

Many are British: Charles Stross writes about interstellar travel as a pyramid scheme, and Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe novels look all too plausibly like the near future. China Miéville has gone beyond mere genre into a strange new realm of his own. Ian R. MacLeod's novels about the British industrial revolution (fuelled by magic, not coal) are powerfully vivid. Liu Cixin has single-handedly made China a science-fiction producer to reckon with.

Ursula's daughters

Even more encouragingly, many new writers are women. Aliette de Bodard, Franco-Vietnamese, writes beautifully about fallen angels ruling Paris and interstellar empires ruled by Vietnamese. Finnish writers Leena Krohn and Emmi Itäranta offer very different visions of very strange worlds.

Here in Canada we have Emily St. John Mandel's acclaimed climate-fiction novel Station Eleven, and Vancouver's Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose Signal to Noise evokes a 1980s Mexico City where teenagers cast magic spells on one another.

All are worthy daughters and grand-daughters of Ursula K. Le Guin, who's still writing superbly in her 80s, and I don't see a blockbuster in any of them, much less a franchise. They are too distinctive, too individual, and far too unpredictable.

MI5 targeted the Nobel prize-winning author Doris Lessing for 20 years, listening to her phone conversations, opening her mail and closely monitoring her movements, previously top secret files reveal. The files show the extent to which MI5, helped by the Met police special branch, spied on the writer, her friends and associates, long after she abandoned communism, disgusted by the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.

MI5 was concerned about her continuing fierce opposition to colonialism, the files, released at the National Archives on Friday, make clear.

Lessing first came to MI5’s notice in the early 1940s in Southern Rhodesia when, as Doris Tayler, she married Gottfried Lessing, a communist activist and leading figure in the Left Book Club.

She once described marrying Lessing as her “revolutionary duty”. She kept his surname when the marriage ended and she left Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she was brought up, and moved to Britain in 1949.

MI5 stepped up its spying on her when, in the course of its permanent bugging of the British Communist party’s headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden, her name (initially misheard as Lacey) came up in a conversation.

In 1952, MI6 passed to MI5 what it called “character sketches” of members of a visit to Moscow by a number of British authors, the files released on Friday reveal. Under the name Miss Doris Lessing, it wrote: “Her communist sympathies have been fanned almost to the point of fanaticism owing to her upbringing in Rhodesia, which has brought out in her a deep hatred of the colour bar.”

MI6 added: “Colonial exploitation is her pet theme and she has now nearly become as irresponsible in her statements as … saying that everything black is wonderful and that all men and all things white are vicious.”

Two years later, MI5 noted that Lessing was “the leader of the Writers Group” of the British Communist party. In 1956, Special Branch informed MI5 that Lessing, whom it described as “of plump build”, had moved into a flat in Warwick Road, London SW5. “Her flat is frequently visited by persons of various nationality,” it reported, “including Americans, Indians, Chinese and Negroes.” The report added: “It is possible that the flat is being used for immoral purposes.”

The clock is ticking for the public vote in this year’s Hugo awards, which celebrate excellence in science fiction. Sixteen categories are up for grabs, from best novel to short fiction, fan writing, art and dramatic presentation, and the deadline is 31 July. But this year the prizes are not just about celebrating science-fiction – it’s political war.

There’s usually a kerfuffle of one kind or another – popular authors habitually campaign for fans to vote them on to the list, but 2015 has proved the biggest drama the award has ever seen. That’s because two linked online campaign groups, known as the “Sad Puppies” and their more politically extreme running mates, the “Rabid Puppies”, have been campaigning hard to register supporters and bump their preferred titles on to the shortlists. They have managed it, too: this year’s Hugos are packed with Puppies titles.

There’s no avoiding the politically partisan nature of this campaign. Its leading lights range from respectable rightwingers such as US authors Larry Correia and Brad Torgerson, through to those with more outlandish views such as John C Wright and Vox Day (also known as Theodore Beale). It’s the Tea Party of contemporary US sci-fi.

The Puppies are complaining that recent Hugo winners have been too highbrow, and argue that winners such as Anne Leckie’s smart gender-deconstruction of space opera Ancillary Justice, or John Scalzi’s witty Star-Trek-inspired metafiction Redshirts are too experimental and literary.

More importantly, as Sarah Lotz says, they’re also suggesting SF has been hijacked by a conspiracy of “social justice warriors” or “SJWs”, intent on filling the genre with progressive ideological propaganda.

The Puppies’ real beef is that SF, and society as a whole, has become too feminist, too multiracial, too hospitable to gay and trans voices. Anti-SJW rhetoric, most of it proceeding from angry straight white men, has flooded online discussions. It’s been ugly. It’s also proving self-defeating. George RR Martin’s intervention, urging people to register and vote in order to defeat the plans of people he call “assholes”, has galvanised the counter-vote.

First of all, awards like the Hugos don't reflect literary skill or imagination; they're marketing gimmicks.

Second, it's ironic that SF should be criticized for being too "highbrow," when it originated as an intellectuals' amusement—an intellectual satire on intellectualism, scholars laughing at their own obsession about knowledge and where it might lead. Northrop Frye called it Menippean satire or anatomy, and traced it back to the Greeks.

But the current uproar is nothing new. SF has been a vehicle for political propaganda for centuries, starting with Thomas More's Utopia, which took the piss out of European politics by presenting an alternative to it.

Yet I managed to scandalize an SF convention circa 1972 by suggesting that a lot of modern SF has a whiff of fascism (and this was over a decade after Starship Troopers).

Personally I don't give a damn about an SF writer's politics. Plenty of "social justice warriors" write badly, and writers like Robert Heinlein are superb (Heinlein was a genius at straight-faced put-ons—you could never tell if he meant what he said or was just pursuing a thought experiment to its logical end).

But I do object to writers who can't tell a good story and expect their political views to keep their readers buying their stuff. A really good storyteller will pursue the implications of the story wherever they lead, even if they call the storyteller's own politics into question. (I used to unnerve myself by the awful things my politically liberal characters were capable of doing, and I often sympathized with the predicaments faced by my oppressor-villains.)

Regardless of the outcome of the Hugos, I'll read SF and fantasy that surprises me by finding something surprising in genres that have been beaten almost to death in the last half-century. And I'm delighted that half a century after Heinlein and Tolkien, both genres are erupting in strange and wonderful new directions. If some writers want to express the vision of anxious, angry white American guys, great. If they can express that vision well, I'll be happy to read them.

I'll also be surprised. Heinlein's dead, guys. Utopia doesn't bomb its way out of its problems.

Much contemporary fantasy is quite violent, perhaps in an attempt to win the respect of people who assume fantasy is all fairies and fluff; but I doubt if that’s why so much of China Miéville’s work is so in-your-face gruesome. More likely he is meeting the expectations of a readership used to the infinite kill count of sensational films and electronic games, and is bloody-minded enough to enjoy doing so.

But, knowing him as a writer avowedly committed to Marxist principles of social justice, with an intense sensitivity to contemporary moral and emotional complexities and a thoughtful mind that finds expression in lucid, cogent talks and essays, I wonder if he uses the horrific as a brilliant barrage of blanks concealing a subtler, deeper engagement with the dark side.

Until a few years ago, I was beginning to think fantasy would never recover from Tolkien and his plagiarists: It was going to be elves and dwarves all the way down, driven by a mass market that would no longer wait for readers to discover quirky, offbeat writers.

Mercifully, I was wrong. We now have scores of high-quirk fantasy writers ranging from China Miéville and Charles Stross to Luis Alberto Urrea and the late Mal Peet. Now, I'm happy to say, we have another: A Mexican-Canadian named Silvia Moreno-García.

I discovered her in one of the fantasy/SF roundups in The Guardian, where I've learned about other excellent writers. Her first novel, Signal to Noise, deserves a lot of attention—not just from fantasy readers, but fantasy writers.

The novel gives us two key periods in the life of Mercedes (Meche) Vega, a bright young misfit in 1988 Mexico City who grows into a computer genius woring in Oslo in 2009. As a teenager, she doesn't fit into her school; her only real friend is Sebastian, an equally geeky young guy with a family as dysfunctional as Meche's.

Is this beginning to sound perilously like yet another YA novel about teenage angst? It's not, if only because we also see Meche and Sebastian as thirty-somethings still coping with their adolescent sorrows.

Those sorrows aren't just raging hormones; Meche's father is a DJ dreaming of writing a definitive book on pop music, who eventually dies alone in a grubby apartment jammed with thousands of old vinyl discs. As much as her dad drives her crazy, Meche has picked up his love of music, and stumbles on the power of magic through listening to a classic pop song and then seeing a school bully laid low by it.

I responded to Signal to Noise on both personal and intellectual levels. Personally: I grew up in early-1950s Mexico City, when we listened to American pop music on radio station XEL and suffered through the exquisite sorrows of expat teens at the American High School. We hardly knew how to make sense of our world until some Hollywood movie arrived. (The Blackboard Jungle, about inner-city juvenile delinquents, caused a major discipline problem at AHS when it first played in Mexico City.)

So it's nice to see that matters did not improve by the late 1980s, though the 1980s music was light-years beyond the early-50s drivel we loved on XEL.

Intellectually, Signal to Noise makes a point usually lost on North American anglophones: Latin America is a culture even more cosmopolitan than our own (because we barely notice the Latin Americans). Meche and her buddies are fully conversant with American and European music, as well as their own. For Meche's alcoholic dad, that foreign music is worth throwing away his life on—and Meche finds it worthwhile to try to turn his manuscript into something publishable.

So it's a witty and literate exploitation of our pop music to make it the source of the magic that Meche learns how to wield, if only to exact revenge on her jerky classmates. It's also a reminder than Mexico is a fully modern country (even in its violence and corruption), fully engaged in the world whether the gringos notice it or not.

Even on basic technical terms, the novel works very well. Meche's gradual descent, from discovering her power to abusing it, is entirely plausible. As the surviving father of two teenage daughters, I was sorely tempted to try some percussive therapy on Meche with a baseball bat. That's a tribute to Moreno-García's ability to evoke character, and she then shows Meche growing beyond her follies into someone we can understand and respect.

And what can other fantasy writers learn from Signal to Noise? Well, it tells them to ditch the elves and dwarves and look for the magic in the people around them. For Moreno-García the magic is in the music; it could as easily be in the annotations to the Torah in some Talmudic school, or an obscure corner of calculus that unleashes demons. As Leonard Cohen observed in his 1967 novel Beautiful Losers, "God is alive, magic is afoot."

Magic is certainly afoot in Signal to Noise, and other writers should pay attention.

Two authors have withdrawn their work from contention for the prestigious Hugo science fiction awards in the wake of what George RR Martin has called “Puppygate”, the controversy that has “plunged all fandom into war”.

Marko Kloos, whose novel Lines of Departure had been picked along with four other authors for the best novel Hugo – an award that counts Dune and Neuromancer among its former winners – announced on Wednesday that he had withdrawn his acceptance of the nomination. Annie Bellet, whose "Goodnight Stars" was a contender for best short story, also withdrew from the race.

Both writers had been included on a slate of titles pulled together by a group of right-leaning science fiction writers dubbing themselves the Sad Puppies, who had mobilised fans to pay for membership of Worldcon, enabling them to vote and thus flood the categories with their choices. Brad Torgersen, the author behind Sad Puppies, wanted to reverse what he called the Hugos’ favouring of works that were “niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavour, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun”.

But they were also on the slate for the so-called Rabid Puppies campaigners, led by the writer Theodore Beale, known online as Vox Day, an inflammatory far-right blogger who was expelled from the Science Fiction Writers of America following racist comments about the award-winning author NK Jemisin.

“It has come to my attention that Lines of Departure was one of the nomination suggestions in Vox Day’s ‘Rabid Puppies’ campaign,” wrote Kloos. “I cannot in good conscience accept an award nomination that I feel I may not have earned solely with the quality of the nominated work. I also wish to disassociate myself from the originator of the ‘Rabid Puppies’ campaign. To put it bluntly: if this nomination gives even the appearance that Vox Day or anyone else had a hand in giving it to me because of my perceived political leanings, I don’t want it. I want to be nominated for awards because of the work, not because of the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ politics.”

I've never really understood the point of such awards, except as a marketing gimmick. A good novel (especially an SF or fantasy novel) ought to challenge our vision of the world, not just agree with it–and that's regardless of whether we buckle our sashes to the right or the left. And whether a novel is really good depends on how long readers keep reading it, and discussing it.

Starship Troopers, for example, doubtless fits somewhere in the far right political spectrum. But it's been in print and in people's minds since 1959, providing ideas that are good to chew on even if hard to swallow. That's the kind of value no mere award can bestow, least of all within a year of publication.

And while Starship Troopers inspired the generally boring genre of military SF (which includes Lines of Departure), it also inspired Joe Haldeman's Forever War, a scathing critique of the whole idea of a society built on warfare. With the first novel, we wouldn't have had the second.

Science fiction has always been political, ever since Thomas More wrote Utopia as a witty satire on the failings of Christian Europe. Precisely because it's not obviously about present politics, it's a safe way to criticize the status quo. (Thomas More lost his head, but not because of his fiction.)

Ever since, science fiction has shown us a range of utopias where everything is wonderful and dystopias where nothing is good. All were really about the current state of affairs. Very few have had any real political effect, but they all offer insights into the social temper of their times.

In the last few years, the dystopia has suddenly surged to dominate both popular and "serious" literature. The young-adult (YA) novel, a subgenre once aimed at slow or reluctant teen readers, is now read far outside its target market, largely because it often deals with big social issues like sexual identity and race. Dystopias are a good venue for such issues.

YA dystopias aimed at girls have now become bestsellers -- and those books have become big business as film series like The Hunger Games and Divergent.

This is a dramatic change from my own early days as a science fiction writer, when my editors warned me dystopias didn't sell and neither did kids' stories with girls as protagonists (boys wouldn't read them, I was told).

After moping for years about the lack of good science fiction like the pulp I grew up with, I've recently been reading a great many novels that leave my teenage heroes Heinlein and Asimov in the dust. (My own novels of the 1980s and '90s aren't even in the running.)

Many of them are by women, and feature young women as protagonists. They're both well-written and well-crafted, with complicated characters living in worlds described with an almost documentary concreteness. As entertainment, they're superb.

But I find them notably lacking in the kind of political awareness a good dystopian writer ought to display.

Helena Coggan’s debut, The Catalyst, is an accomplished first novel: a fantasy-dystopia featuring strong characterisation and sophisticated world-building. The plot might be somewhat event-saturated, especially towards the end, but to me, the book has the assurance of a writer in mid-stride, rather than the occasional fumbles and missteps of a first attempt.

This would be unusual in most debut novels; in a 15-year-old’s, it’s nearly unparalleled.

This is not to say that teenagers can’t or shouldn’t write. Young writers can be both prolific and self-critical – and story-sharing sites such as Wattpad and Movellas make it easy to invite outside scrutiny. Many teenagers start out wearing fan-fiction water-wings, before plunging into the creation of characters and settings from scratch. But few of even the most popular teen authors are ready to make the leap into the exposed format of the traditionally published book.

I admire young writer Beth Reekles tremendously, not least for combining a degree in physics with her early-burgeoning career as a writer. But her first book, The Kissing Booth, now published by Random House after huge success on Wattpad, shows signs of immaturity in the unnerving relationship that it presents as romantic and alluring – the main love interest, Noah, is handy with his fists and swift to tell the 17-year-old protagonist that she’s showing too much skin, and that all the boys would hit on her if he weren’t there to ward them off. He’s presented throughout as the hottest of hot stuff; but 10 years on, a writer might be more inclined to portray him as a dangerous abuser-in-training than as the perfect romantic fit for the heroine.

There is nothing more important in writing YA fiction, though, than creating authentic young-adult voices to tell the story. It’s a hard balance to strike – an adult writer too far removed from the ever-changing emotions, technology and idioms that inform teenagers’ existence may make rookie errors that jolt the reader; a teenage writer may not yet have the skill to distil their recent experience and knowledge into book form.

This, to me, is part of what makes Coggan’s book so special: a main character who’s neither a barely animated cardboard cut-out nor an aggressively perfected version of the author. Instead, Rosalyn Elmsworth is a sometimes dislikable, believably exceptional 15-year-old – who happens to be keeping a deadly secret.

Having the ability to turn one’s own life into compelling fiction is rare for a teenage writer, but not impossible; SE Hinton’s The Outsiders, considered by many to be the first true YA novel, was mainly written when she was 16. It’s still remarkable for the close, truthful feel of the characterisation and the humane treatment of the Greasers, the gang from the wrong side of the tracks; the wry, witty, put-upon narrator, Ponyboy, is a particular triumph. (“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”)

A YouGov poll that has just been released rates being an author the most desirable job in Britain – with 60% of people saying they’d like to do it for a living. This is a 24% higher than those who want to be a TV presenter and a remarkable 29% higher than those who want to be a movie star.

The mind boggles – or it would if authors didn’t spend a good majority of their time assiduously, and at tedious length, trying to avoid cliches. The fact that people fantasise about being an author only proves how little they know about the reality of the job – or how under-read they are in one of the greatest of that profession, George Orwell.

It was Orwell who wrote this description of the novelist: “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon which one can neither resist nor understand.“

This is not a view of writing that occupies a great deal of space in the popular imagination. On the contrary, authors are seen as rather serene, noble characters, licking their pencils, perpetually looking out the window for inspiration – which always comes – and floating in a bubble, enjoying an Olympian perspective on the world, not bound to the nine to five like the rest, but picking beautiful sentences out of the air like passing butterflies, which they trap and affix decoratively to the page.

If only it were like that. Some writers do, I admit, talk up the delights of creating fiction. All I can say is, I have been writing books for nigh on 20 years now – and it has not been out of choice but for exactly the reason that Orwell describes – “driven by some demon which one can neither resist nor understand”.

I have on more than one occasion longed for a different way of making a living, a hope that I understand now is entirely in vain, as it is my only marketable ability.

But it was Ursula K. Le Guin, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters early in the evening, who gave the definitive remarks of the ceremony, gliding through the genre debate and the Amazon-Hachette debacle on her way to explaining the crucial role that literature must play in our society.

Petite, her silver hair shining, Le Guin shrugged and grinned when Neil Gaiman placed the medal around her neck. She said that she wanted to share the honor with her fellow-fantasy and sci-fi writers, who have for so long watched “the beautiful awards,” like the one she’d just received, go to the “so-called realists.” Then she continued:

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope.

We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

As a free-range kid over 60 years ago, I liked to go down to the Thieves' Market in Mexico City on Sundays. A smart 12-year-old shopper could come home with a once-functional six-gun -- or reasonably recent copies of American pulp magazines like Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories.

My parents imposed a disarmament program, but the magazines stayed. Despite their lurid artwork and clunky prose, I fell in love with the ideas they dramatized. Science fiction and fantasy inspired me to write the same kind of pulp, and to keep at it until I'd published almost a dozen novels of my own.

Then science fiction and fantasy became industries; Tolkien rip-offs competed with novels of interstellar war based on the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. Star Wars and Star Trek became invasive species, turning the vast ecosystems of 1950s science fiction into dreary monocultures. Don't get me going about Game of Thrones.

I stopped writing science fiction and largely stopped reading it. Then economist and science fiction junkie Paul Krugman mentioned a British novelist named Charles Stross, a prolific writer of both science fiction and fantasy. Stross's extraordinary novels taught me that I was lucky to have got out of the business when I did, because I sure couldn't have competed with him.

It was a strange sensation to check Google News on a lovely spring morning and find a new headline: "Irreversible collapse." The collapse is of a major part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet under the steady erosion of warming sea water. Pretty dramatic, no doubt, but just another global warming story.

Unless you'd already written the story 40 years ago.

The recent reports cite a 1978 prediction by U.S. glaciologist John H. Mercer that such an event might result from global warming. But I had been inspired by a 1964 report that argued such a surge could start an ice age.

I can still recall the moment, circa 1973, when I ran across a newspaper article on that report. According to a New Zealand scientist named A. T. Wilson, sea water periodically gets under the Antarctic ice sheets and acts like a lubricant, allowing the enormous weight of the ice to surge into the Southern Ocean.

With the ocean covered by ice as far north as 55º south, sunlight would be reflected back into space and the planet would begin to cool. The ice would eventually melt, raising sea levels by some 20 metres in "100 years or much less," according to another scientist.

But the cooling would persist longer than the ice. Soon snow in the northern hemisphere would survive the summers, growing into glaciers and then into continental ice sheets.

I set to work on a science fiction thriller I titled Icequake, setting it in the distant future year of 1985. The first step was research: I found the original article by Wilson, and follow-up articles by him and others. Then I researched the history and present of the Antarctic, right down to the bearskins that the Russians used as doors in their Vostok base.

The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fourth collection of stories are to be re-published with all of the sex, nudity, drug-taking and profanity originally censored by editors of The Saturday Evening Post reinstated.

The author's short stories were written for The Post during the late 1920s and early 1930s and while he was heavily in debt despite his popularity.

The Post, fearing it may upset its middle class readership, removed references to sexual acts, innuendos and nudity, including a scene involving a woman running a bath naked, amending it instead to a fully clothed woman running the water.

Scholar James West has since restored the stories using final drafts to present them in their original form for the latest volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F Scott Fitzgerald.

“Before these stories were bowdlerised, they contained slurs, sexual innuendo, instances of drug use and drunkenness. They also contained profanity and mild blasphemy. The texts were scrubbed clean at The Post,” Mr West told The Guardian.

“More generally, in all of the stories, the characters use the profanity, mild blasphemies, and slang words that Fitzgerald wanted them to use. They [the characters] speak like real people,” he added.

The wife of the octogenarian Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, Mercedes Barcha, and their sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo today issued a statement in which they said the condition of the 1982 Nobel Laureate is stable but "very fragile," and the "there are risks of complications" owing to his age.

The family of the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude said the novelist "is convalescing and will remain in his house" in Mexico City after a recent hospitalization for infections in the lungs and urinary tract.

It added that García Márquez "has received very many expressions of affection from friends and through the media. The family is grateful for these and asks that their privacy be respected."

All of Latin America, and much of the rest of the world, will be deeply saddened when Gabo goes. I will be among them. He has always been the Maestro, the writer who dumbfounded all other writers with his perception and storytelling genius.